


Gargoyle

by audreycritter



Category: Batman (Comics), Superman (Comics), Superman/Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bromance, Friendship, Gen, Lois is a night owl, Mention of wonderbat as a concept, batman has some friends, checking on friends, mutual goals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 06:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12382623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Batman sometimes checks on Clark Kent after traumatic situations.He’s just about as awkward and dramatic about it as, well, Batman.





	Gargoyle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jerseydevious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/gifts).



> Thank you so much to jerseydevious for editing! I also owe her for the headcanon that inspired this.

The first time it happened, Lois Lane-Kent had only been married for three months. She slipped out of bed, which roused a restless Clark; she promised him she was okay, it was just jet lag and she was going to get some water.

It wasn’t just jet lag.

He fell back asleep without sitting up, without offering to keep her company, and she went into their apartment kitchen with her worry and wakefulness doubled.

Lois poured a glass of water from the tap, turned to look out the window, and strangled a screech while spilling water all down the front of her loose pajama shirt. Wet bloomed across the Smallville Cyclones Debate Team block lettering.

“Lois?” Clark asked, still sounding sleepy, from the other room.

She glared at the shadows in the window and snatched a kitchen towel to dry off the shirt a bit.

“I’m fine,” she called back. “Just saw a spider. I killed it. Go back to sleep.”

She threw the towel on the counter and strode across to the window and after listening a moment for Clark, slid the window open.

“I don’t think we would’ve accepted the apartment as a gift if we’d known you came with it,” Lois said into the darkness outside the apartment building. There was no reply. “Are you sure you understand how gifts work?”

There was a slight shift in the darkness to the left and she could see the silhouette of the cowl against the navy sky.

“You scared the shit out of me, you know,” she added conversationally. The worry was churning with anger now but she’d long since learned to mask her emotions; her profession had made that necessary and it was a hard habit to shake.

The caped figure made no apology.

“I’m fine, though, thanks for asking,” she said.

“He’s not.” Batman turned to her, then, the lenses of his cowl faint gray-white spots in the pitch black, like the glimmer of headlights hitting a puddle on the road.

And Lois’ chest tightened and her casual game face vanished. She glanced back into the depths of the apartment and bit the inside of her cheek, considering. She was relatively new at _this_ , at both sides of Clark’s life and filling in all the gaps where he’d usually just vanish for a while.

“No,” she agreed quietly. “Balcony?”

There was a flutter of cape in reply and a chilly breeze swept up from the stories below. She retreated into the kitchen, grabbed a sweater that had been thrown over a chair, and heated a cup of water for hot chocolate. Hopefully, if Clark woke enough to hear her moving around, he’d just think she was settling in with a book or something. Instinct told her Batman hadn’t come to talk to Clark, for once, and her instincts were life-or-death sharpened tools.

If she kept Batman waiting a few minutes, well, it served him right for being a creepy weirdo who perched outside people’s dining room windows.

She partly expected him to be gone already by the time she unlocked the balcony door and slipped out into the midnight air. She’d underestimated either his patience or his resolve, because he was there, sitting in one of the balcony chairs in a darker corner. He was under the burnt out light, and she dragged the other chair closer so she wouldn’t feel like she was sitting in spotlight.

“So, what’s up?” she asked, curling her hands around the mug. “I’m guessing you had a reason for stalking us.”

His jaw tensed and there was more silence for a long moment. She sipped the hot chocolate and watched what appeared to be a visible struggle with himself.

“There were children,” he said, his tone soft and gruff at the same time. It was quiet in a way that stilled the air around them.

He wasn’t the only one who could be patient. Lois knew how to wait out a story just as well as she knew how to pry for one. She waited.

“He was with me three nights ago when I went to a crime scene. There were several victims’ bodies, all of them young. None of them were…in good condition.”

_Oh._

“He’s not used to Gotham,” Batman added, after the lingering pause. “It’s a lot to deal with. I’m concerned he’s not handling it well.”

Lois remembered going on a date, years and years ago, with Bruce Wayne. She’d alternated between being charmed and wanting to smash his perfect teeth in. Not much had changed really, except the realization that most of those teeth were now probably fake, which made her feel slightly less annoyed by how white and straight they were. Even then, he’d been able to talk pretty easily as long as the subject wasn’t himself.

It seemed like that hadn’t changed much, either.

“He’s been more quiet than usual,” Lois said, staring into her half-empty mug. “Sleeping more. I knew something was wrong.”

“He used to go to the Fortress,” Batman said. He hadn’t moved the entire time he’d been sitting there. It was a bit like talking to a statue. “He’d spend a few days there.”

And Lois, as stubborn and independent as she was and could be, found herself a bit at a loss; every time she thought she’d figured him out, there’d be another little folder of Clark’s dual lives that opened up as something she _didn’t know_ , another area where she’d been unintentionally left in the dark. She was consoled by the fact that she was now collecting all the details: she’d get a bit from Jonathan, a bit from Martha, a bit from an old card Lana had sent him, now a bit from Batman.

It didn’t change that it was an unsettling feeling, like there were still parts of him that were a stranger to her.

“Do you think he didn’t go because of me?” Lois asked, burying her face behind the mug while she took another sip. The hot chocolate was cooling fast. “Should I tell him to go?”

“No,” Batman said. “I think it’s better for him here. It’s better to not be alone with it.”

“How are you doing?” Lois asked, meeting the blank gaze of the cowl with a pointed look.

“I’m used to it,” he said, flatly.

“Hmm,” she said, thinking _liar_ , but letting it slide. “Want some hot chocolate?”

“No,” he said, after a hesitation that was a beat too long. He sounded tired.

“So you just came to check on him?” she asked. “You know, there are these things called phones.”

“He doesn’t need more reasons to accuse me of hypocrisy,” Batman said, with the flash of a smirk. “I’m glad he has you. He’ll be alright.”

She wasn’t sure if the two thoughts were connected or if he was awkwardly attempting to reassure her. It didn’t matter, really, since now all she wanted was to sneak back inside and toward her bed and curl up against Clark until the lines in his face smoothed out and he breathed a bit more deeply.

“Thank you,” she said. Batman was already on the other side of the railing, a grappling gun in hand. He froze but didn’t turn. “For checking on him. For giving me a heads up.”

He nodded once, and she didn’t watch him go.

She went back into the apartment and left the mug in the sink.

* * *

It wasn’t often, but several times a year Clark would come back from something with the League or with Batman alone or just off-world and be in a _mood_. He’d go through a few days stripped of his usually cheerful disposition, be quick to rant about injustices they covered at the paper, talk less, sleep more.

Sometimes, Clark would talk directly about it with her. Other times, she’d find herself getting out of bed for water or tea and checking the window. If Clark wasn’t talking, Batman was usually there. She never did quite figure out how he knew if Clark was venting to her or not, and it was a mystery she was content to leave alone for now.

Not forever, maybe. But for now.

It was early on that she figured out Clark knew it was happening, when she crawled back into bed once and he rolled over to mumble grumpily, “Did Bruce leave?” and she knew he must have known all along. He was not usually a grumpy person and it was perversely satisfying to witness a more human response from him.

And it seemed to help him anyway; maybe it was knowing people were watching out for him. She wasn’t sure, but he always did better after even if they didn’t talk much about why.

If Clark knew anyway, she didn’t see any reason to sit in the frigid snowy air in the middle of winter. Batman had come as far as the edge of the living room then, towering in the space and looking sheepish all the same. He’d been at the apartment in normal clothes only a month before but hadn’t looked nearly as out of place then.

This time, Clark had been restless and out of sorts for almost a week. Batman came as far as the kitchen table and even took his cowl off, and Lois felt like she’d captured ET in her closet with Reese’s Pieces while setting a bowl of ice cream in front of him without asking. Irony of ironies, there _was_ an actual alien in the apartment and it wasn’t him.

Bruce had stopped refusing ice cream or a hot drink years ago, when he’d come by to sit outside their window and almost passed out before she’d gotten to the balcony. She’d discovered him swaying all those dozens of stories up, insisted he eat _something_ , and found out from Clark later he probably hadn’t eaten or slept in days because of a League thing.

So she sat at her kitchen table at two in the morning, eating mint chocolate ice cream with Bruce Wayne, whose hair was a tangled, matted mess and his face was a network of bruises. The empty cowl stared at her blankly from the edge of the table.

“Barry and I were trapped with a bomb,” he said calmly, as if they were discussing how to file taxes. “It was close.”

“How close?” she asked, with an equal mix of curiosity and need.

“We were still trapped when it went off,” he said. “We didn’t get the brunt of the impact but it looked bad at first.”

She wondered if that explained the u-shaped black and blue mark on his cheek, or if that was unrelated. She thought, too—more uneasily— about Clark watching an explosion and thinking he’d lost two friends.

Even if it were only a few seconds, Clark had a strangely abstract relationship with time; probably a side effect of being able to travel hundreds of miles in the span of a normal breath.

“Well, fuck,” she said, dragging her spoon tip across a ridge of ice cream. “You okay?”

“I’m used to it,” he said, with a smile in his tone that didn’t touch his face. It’d become something of a joke. “He hasn’t said anything.”

“No,” she said, to the question that lacked the right inflection. “We’ll get out of town for a day or two. It’s been a while.”

“Good,” Bruce said, running a hand through his hair. The bowl she’d set in front of him was empty. He stood and pushed the cowl back into place.

“He’d probably appreciate a call.”

“I’m not going to smother him.”

“It’s not smothering to just do a normal thing,” Lois retorted, incredulous at how dense he could be sometimes. “Text him if it pains you _that_ much.”

“Noted,” Bruce said, which wasn’t an agreement or an argument.

He let himself out through the balcony door while Lois rinsed bowls. She booked plane tickets before she walked, yawning, down the hall and into the dark bedroom. The email of the ticket confirmation lit up her phone screen with the harsh glow of a notification; she flipped the phone to rest screen down, snuggled against Clark’s back, and drifted to sleep.

* * *

It was just the beginning of summer when Lois poked her head out the window at ten til three and said, briefly, “Get in here, asshole.”

She was crossing the border from annoyed to pissed, after Clark had stomped around just narrowly _not breaking everything_ , muttering darkly about a certain idiot before she’d wormed the whole story out of him. It wasn’t a surprise Batman had also noticed the foul mood since it cropped up the same day as a League meeting.

Lois went to make coffee. Let him deal with the balcony lock on his own. He appeared behind her a minute later.

“Sit,” she snapped, scooping grounds into the filter.

“You’re mad at me,” he said, the words even.

“No, I’m mad that I have to deal with…this,” she said, gesturing indiscriminately at the kitchen.

“I can make coffee,” he said, and she whirled to glare at him.

“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Bruce.”

He had the cowl off, and in one hand. His expression was just the edge of perplexed and she didn’t mind letting it stew. She went back to furiously measuring coffee. She made it extra strong, to suit her own mood.

“Clark is angry,” Bruce said, slowly, like he was examining pieces of a puzzle.

“You have any idea why?” Lois prodded, jabbing the button on the coffee maker. She’d been _planning_ on getting good sleep for once, right up until she promised Clark she’d handle it _just this once_ and if it backfired, Clark could go around making apologies.

“…no.” Bruce didn’t take a seat at the table. She turned and leaned on the counter.

“Clark thinks you’re throwing away a good thing before it even begins, because you’re stubborn and self-punishing.”

“He said that.” Bruce moved the cowl from one hand to the other.

“I _gathered_ it, from other things he said. Don’t quote me.” The drip of the coffee behind her was weirdly calming and she took a second to just listen to it, before pulling two mugs down from a cabinet.

“What good thing am I reportedly throwing away this time?” Bruce took a chair after all, relaxing a little. Apparently assaults on his life choices were perceived as less of a threat than the vague anger he’d been fielding before.

“He thinks, and you _can_ quote me on this one, that you ‘have a pathological aversion to the possibility of being happy.’”

She turned just in time to see him wince. “Clark said that.”

“I know,” Lois said, a little fondly. “I was proud of him, too. And the only reason I’m even getting involved is because I’d like my husband back, instead of the grouchy creature I get when he thinks you’re being exceptionally stupid.”

“He could talk to me himself,” Bruce pointed out.

“He said he tried and you shut it down.”

Lois didn’t know if it was because he felt comfortable there or because she’d gotten good at reading him, but she actually saw his eyes widen a little.

And then that infuriating smirk curled one side of his mouth.

“Is this because I won’t ask Diana on a date.”

“It was easy enough for you to ask me,” Lois said, pouring the steaming coffee. She plunked a mug in front of him and took another seat at the table. “So, spill. What’s the deal? Clark is convinced you like her enough.”

The smirk faded and was replaced by something stony, something incredibly hard and closed off.

“It couldn’t end well for anyone,” he said stiffly, one bare hand wrapped around the coffee mug. She hadn’t even noticed him taking the gloves off.

“So, you do like her,” Lois said. “ _Like_ her, like her.”

“Are we in middle school,” Bruce said, his tone still harsh. She ignored it and studied him.

“Are you…afraid?” Lois asked, the dawning realization like a slap in the face. “Damn, Bruce. That stings a little. I’m guessing you didn’t feel that way about asking me.”

“It’s Diana,” he said, a little helplessly.

“I was joking,” Lois said, taking pity on him. “What we had was casual and that’s all it was ever going to be. We both knew that.”

“This would…not be,” he said, his hand still tight around the mug. “Which is why it can’t happen.”

“Or you could give it a try _anyway_ ,” Lois said, less gently than she had meant for it to sound. “It’s not like things turned out so bad for me and Clark and we’re not exactly a traditional pair, either.”

She watched the brief agony flicker across his features and then smooth out into forced calm. He drank some of the coffee, his posture ramrod straight in the chair.

“I’m not Clark,” he said, finally, with a little bitterness.

“Go on,” Lois said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Things…don’t go well for me, usually.”

“Still nothing new,” Lois said, rather than arguing _that_ point, because hadn’t she watched most of it from a distance? Neither of them were idiots.

The brief surprise at this concession on her part was worth it. It threw him enough that he paused and swallowed before forcing himself on.

“I work with Diana.”

“You’re doing a great job reviewing stuff first,” Lois commented, sipping her coffee. It got her an annoyed glare. She shrugged.

“If…” Bruce’s brow creased and he stared at the coffee like he hated it. “If things don’t go well, it could complicate vital working relationships. It could make it uncomfortable for Clark. And if things do go well, there’s an unavoidable expiration date. I’m unlikely to die of old age. And Diana is likely going to outlive me, regardless, which means that eventually it would be…painful.”

He said this last word like it was inherently distasteful on his tongue and Lois blinked at him.

“Shit. I didn’t have you pegged as such a traditionalist,” Lois said.

Bruce stopped eyeing the coffee with a loathsome frown and glanced at her; he raised an eyebrow.

Lois shrugged again. “You’re talking about it like it’s going to end in disaster or lifelong commitment,” she said. “I know you tend to go all-in, but maybe just start with a single date? And also, if you really respect and possibly love her— don’t make that face at me, you clearly have feelings, whether you like them or not— consider letting Diana make that choice about what sort of pain she wants to risk in the hypothetical future.”

Bruce didn’t say anything for a long time, but his shoulders slumped a little.

“This is the thanks I get for listening to Clark agonize over his personal life for years,” he said, a little sullenly, almost like a teenager. She was very suddenly glad they hadn’t known each other in high school because she had the distinct impression that they might have burned things down. “This meddling.”

The word had a slightly British inflection and she couldn’t tell if it was unconscious on his part or intentional. She finished off her coffee.

“Well, there’s a limited number of people who can meddle in Batman’s personal life, so it falls to us.”

“You are aware I have five children,” he said. “Five children who have very few reservations about telling me what to do.”

“Do you ever listen?” Lois asked, with a grin.

“…rarely.”

“Then it’s all hands on deck,” she said.

Bruce finished his coffee and pulled his gloves back on. “Thank you,” he said stiffly. “I’ll consider it. Tell Clark he’s as bad as his mother.”

“Oh, I do,” Lois said gleefully. “As often as I can. Aren’t they wonderful?”

“Ask her!” a deep yell came from the bedroom. “Or I’ll recruit Alfred to the cause!”

Bruce closed his eyes and sighed, long and quiet, and the tugged the cowl on.

“I told you to let me handle it!” Lois shouted back, pouring another cup of coffee. “He’s fragile!”

“I don’t know why I come here,” Bruce said, resigned and weary. “I have actual work I should do.”

“Bye,” Lois said cheerfully, before lowering her voice and letting a bit of actual concern creep back in. “Actually consider it? It wouldn’t kill you to enjoy something a bit. You’re allowed, you know.”

He made a noise that was probably dismissal of this idea but didn’t protest more than that, which she took as a small victory. He was gone by the time Clark wandered down the hall from the bedroom.

“That went well,” he said. “Is there more coffee?”

“You owe me,” Lois said, kissing his cheek. “Like, super, super owe me. I hate playing matchmaker. I’m going back to bed before the sun shows up.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Clark promised, getting another mug out. It had a Nightwing symbol on it. “Promise.”

* * *

The apartment was a disturbed quiet, with the weight of two days of irresolution hanging over everything. Nothing she’d said or done had changed that. Lois had lived most of her adult life confronting difficult situations and pursuing uncomfortable conversations, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit next to Clark while he put his head in his hands and struggled to talk.

She was sitting up and awake in the middle of the night, after coming home from work where she’d churned out a last minute story. He’d already been asleep and she’d left him sleeping, warmed up leftovers she had no taste for, and sat in front of the TV without turning it on.

The balcony door slid open and it didn’t surprise her. She hadn’t been waiting or hoping, exactly, but she’d been expecting him to eventually show up. Lois listened to the rustle of cape and then a shadow fell across her on the couch.

“Six hostages,” she said before he spoke, her mouth dry. “Six and then the gunman. What the hell am I supposed to say to him?”

“He’s blaming himself,” Batman said.

Lois looked up; her face felt hot and gritty. Bruce looked exhausted, with deep blue-gray under his eyes. The cowl was tucked under his arm.

“Of course he fucking is,” Lois hissed. “I don’t think I have to tell you what the demand was.”

She put a hand over her face and sighed. She set the lukewarm leftovers aside on the coffee table, her meager appetite entirely gone.

 _You die, they’ll live_ had been the condition, the irrational demand. She knew, from the news and from his own account, that Clark had tried to talk him down and calm him.

 _We don’t give into terrorist demands_ , she’d assured him. But she knew if he’d realized a second sooner how close the man was to pulling the trigger, had suspected talking wouldn’t work, Clark would have found Kryptonite in a heartbeat and rammed it into his own chest.

“I wouldn’t have let him have it,” Bruce said. She thought of the Kryptonite locked in a cave vault, the sliver in the utility belt mere feet from her. A failsafe, Clark always insisted, unbothered by it. She guessed Bruce was saying it now as much for Clark’s benefit as her own, in case he was listening. “People like the gunman are notoriously unreliable about holding up their end of any deals.”

And he ought to know, coming from Gotham.

“Would you talk to him?” Lois asked, her voice quiet and sounding small and defeated to her own ears. She hated it. “I’ve tried. He won’t listen to me.”

“He needs time,” Bruce said.

“He needs someone to get it through his thick head that it’s not his damn fault,” Lois snapped. She exhaled, short and forceful. “And he thinks I’m too easy on him, that I’m just looking for reasons to let him off the hook.”

“Hnn.” Bruce didn’t move at all for several seconds. “I don’t know how long we’ll be gone.”

“I can talk to him _with_ you if you think it’ll help. I’m not trying to get rid of him, I just want him to believe one of us.”

Lois buried her face in her palms and took a deep breath. There was a brief, hard squeeze of her shoulder and then Bruce moved away, so quickly she felt the absence before she placed the direction of the bootsteps.

“Clark!” His voice could be loud when he wanted it to be. It was joined by the firm pounds of a fist against the bedroom door. “Clark. Get dressed.”

She heard the door open and she glanced toward them. Clark looked about two inches tall.

“What are you doing?” Clark asked listlessly, giving her a haggard look past Bruce.

“We’re going to the lodge,” Bruce said, putting his cowl back on. “Get dressed.”

“Lois?” Clark asked down the hall. If she leaned back, she could just see his face.

“I’ll come if you want me to,” she said, meaning it with her whole heart. She’d pack in an instant, or go not packed at all.

Clark looked Bruce up and down and then caught her eyes again. He sighed and stepped around Batman, closed the distance between himself and her on the couch. He kissed her head from behind, and wrapped his arms around her.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said softly, near her ear. “Yell if you need me.”

She nodded and a moment later, she was in the apartment alone.

When she was certain they were gone, she cried and tried not to hate the whole world for the cruelties of a few, but it wasn’t easy.

She cried one more time in the next few days, before Clark let himself in and tossed his keys in the bowl near the door and found her stirring pasta in the kitchen, and hugged her long past the timer beeping and until the noodles were bloated and soggy and overcooked.

They pitched the noodles and ordered takeout and it was like Christmas to see him smile. They talked and whispered long into the night, because they could.

* * *

When Lois opened the balcony door, she guessed he’d be outside the window still. She was wrong. He was sitting on one of the balcony chairs, leaning back a little.

“You look like hell,” she said, noting the pallor of his face.

“Hn,” he said, dismissively.

“I haven’t gotten my flu shot yet,” Lois warned, crossing her arms and hanging back.

“Not flu,” Batman said, coughing and grimacing. “Won a fight, but poorly. How’s Clark?”

“Significantly less injured,” Lois said dryly. “And you might want to hurry up before he comes out here to yell at you.”

“I can handle it,” Bruce said, a little loudly. She guessed it was directed at Clark.

“Want some water?”

“Yes.”

Lois came back out onto the balcony with a glass of water a moment later and handed it to him. He didn’t take his gloves or cowl off out here, outside.

“Off-world conflict,” Bruce said, setting the empty glass down and hauling himself up into an actual sitting position. “A bit of everything.”

“Including you being an idiot,” Lois said, taking the other seat. “He told me.”

“Alright,” Bruce said. “As long as he’s okay.”

“He was having a rough day but he’ll be fine. Go keep yourself in one piece.”

Bruce nodded and stood, slow and halting. He detached a grapple gun from his utility belt and was over the railing before Lois spoke, stopping him.

“Batman,” she said, and he turned his head just slightly.

“Lois,” he answered.

“Thanks for checking on him,” she said, sincere. She hoped it conveyed past her usual sarcasm.

“Of course,” Bruce said, and with the rapid _snick_ of a line and whirl of a cape, he was gone.

She went back inside and climbed into bed. Clark rolled over and murmured something and she patted his cheek. “When you’re feeling better, I think it’s your turn.”

“Mmkay,” he mumbled, not really awake. It was good, then, that he was sleeping more deeply than earlier.

Lois burrowed a bit further under the covers and joined him.


End file.
